We recently had to trouble shoot a Magento 1.9 website where the owner needed to export from Magento to Google Merchant center, so we could setup and run a Google AdWords shopping campaign. Shopping campaigns are low maintenance and often cost effective campaigns which can increase targeted traffic to your ecommerce site.

The problem was that when we were using the official Magento Google plugin, we could map the attributes, but when we added the products to the Google Merchant feed, it would fail without an error message. In System > Configuration > Google API > Google Shopping we had “Debug” set to “Yes“, but still no log was created.

When reviewing the settings with the client they noticed that they had not correctly entered their Gmail address. This was causing the sync to fail without an error message or creating an error log.

Once the email and password were correct, the sync may still fail without producing an error log. If this happens, check your Gmail for a “Suspicious sign-in prevented” email and follow any steps to allow your server to logon over the API.

Ensure Debug is set to “Yes” in the settings at this point and return to Catalogue > Google Content > Manage Items. If there is an error at this point there will be more details in the log in var/logs/. In our case we had to turn all the “Destinations” in the settings to Default as the log was giving an error “location not available”.